V-2 -Chapter 9 - Anti-Oedipus

[Tyler Wilson]

Another tidbit from that letter Pynchon wrote to Thomas Hirsch:"… German Christianity being perhaps the most perfect expression of the whole Western/analytic/"linear"/alienated shtick. It is no accident that Leibniz was co-inventor of calculus, trying to cope with change by stopping it dead, chopping it up into infinitesimals, going in to look at it, the cannonball frozen in mid-flight, little piece by little piece—no accident that Gauss, who contributed most heavily to Modern Analysis, spent his time moonlighting as a diplomatic trouble-shooter traveling from little state to little state, trying to cool off hassles among the hundred princes of the period."

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> > David Morris wrote:
> > I think in both instances the Germans are meant not to represent nationality, but modernity.
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> [ Someone on the pynchonwiki wrote: ]
> … but most notably in 1904, during the Herero Wars, when South-West Africa was a German colony; in V., Pynchon clearly sees the German treatment of the Herero at that time as prefiguring the Holocaust of the Jews in the Nazi era.
> At the same time, this part of the novel is a haunting indictment of Western colonialism and racism; later, in Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon would emphasize this latter aspect, acknowledging the facile identification made between the Herero genocide and the Nazi Holocaust in his earlier novel as "superficial". In a letter to Thomas F. Hirsch, reprinted in David Seed's book The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon, London, MacMillan, 1988, pp. 240-3),
> *** Pynchon wrote,***
> "…When I wrote V. I was thinking of the 1904 campaign as a sort of dress rehearsal for what later happened to the Jews in the 30s and 40s. Which is hardly profound; it must occur to anybody who gets into it even as superficially as I did. But since reading McLuhan especially, and stuff here and there on comparative religion, I feel now the thing goes much deeper. […] I feel that the number done on the Herero head by the Germans is the same number done on the American Indian head by our own colonists and what is now being done on the Buddhist head in Vietnam by the Christian minority in Saigon and their advisors: the imposition of a culture valuing analysis and differentiation on a culture that valued unity and integration."
>
> http://v.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=V.